The increasing integration of decentralized renewable energy resources and the drive for greater efficiency have accelerated the transition from traditional power grids to smart grids. This shift necessitates robust communication architectures to ensure grid stability and prevent blackouts. Fast and reliable communication is especially critical for exchanging measurements and configurations in adaptive grid protection systems, which must be resilient to link and device failures. Allowing the use of multiple communication paths within a single TCP connection, Multipath TCP (MPTCP)’s benefits have been well-researched in other domains but its potential for smart grids remains unexplored. In this paper, we address this gap by conducting a large-scale emulation of a real electric power distribution system’s communication network, incorporating context-specific hardware. Our evaluation shows the feasibility and benefits of MPTCP for realizing failovers in smart grids compared to TCP and QUIC and explores the trade-offs of MPTCP’s default and redundant schedulers in terms of usability and performance.